


A Nest To Rest In

by xathira



Series: Prince of the Unknown [5]
Category: Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon & Comics)
Genre: Angst?, Beast Wirt, Friends reunited, IT'S ME, More angst, More transformation, Other, hello
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2021-01-02 21:07:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21167891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xathira/pseuds/xathira
Summary: Beatrice finds Wirt... or what's left of him.  It isn't as if she can keep him like some cute, harmless animal she rescued from the woods.Or can she?





	1. 🙞Bluebird Calling🙜

Beatrice never gives up looking for Wirt. She simply has a moment of realization that locating The Beast in the vast Unknown is as futile as plucking a needle from a haystack, and that she’s better off waiting for Wirt to reveal himself to _her._ This means going for short hikes through predictable paths, always passing by the clearing where Wirt in his grief had grown thorny brambles around himself like a cage. It means she constantly peers out her window at night, alert for the twin glow of blue fire through the shadows. If Beatrice cannot rip Wirt from the woods herself, then by god she’ll make sure he can’t say she hid from him.

Her loving family does not know about Beatrice’s lost friend. They recall the determined boy who told them that their daughter was still alive, who marched out into the frigid night to rescue his younger brother from a terrible fate. All of them wondered what had become of Wirt when Beatrice returned to the roost—human again, smiling—but the lad wasn’t with her. “They made it home,” Beatrice told them. A lie. “Everything is all right.”

She hadn’t immediately led her siblings to where she left Wirt because every instinct in her warned her not to. For one, Beatrice had no idea how her family would react to the boy with the monstrous glowing eyes. Nor did Beatrice trust Wirt not to hurt one of her siblings by accident. It wasn’t that she thought him evil—not after what they’d been through, or how they’d relied on each other. He’d been _so gentle_ when he cut off her wings. Nonetheless, Beatrice had no idea what her friend was capable of. He sure as _hell_ didn’t know, either. If Wirt had conjured thorned vines bejeweled in poisonous berries with the sheer weight of his sorrow, what might he do in response to the astonished reactions of her boisterous kin? Would he run? Curse them? Turn them into trees? 

So Beatrice had waited. She’d gone with her brothers and sisters, mother and father, and returned to the home they flew from. Too late had she decided to return to the forest, alone, to check on Wirt. She’d thought he would have calmed down with time to muse on his fate. But instead the boy had disappeared.

Survival swiftly dominated Beatrice’s focus. With her older siblings she chopped half-frozen firewood to add to their pile, bringing crackling warmth to the tomblike atmosphere of their briefly abandoned home. She chased squirrels from their bedrooms and helped her mother sweep dust from the creaking floorboards. The family had a few meager supplies left from before their curse had stolen their hands, but not nearly enough to last the winter. Especially not _this_ winter, with its ferocious squalls and perpetual snowfall and bone-deep cold. 

Fewer dry goods to draw from. Traps left empty. Roads into town impassable, embedded in snow and ice. Beatrice feels personally responsible for the fatigue of her loved ones, even though not a single one of them would ever, _ever_ blame her in word or thought. 

Desperation hounds their doorstep. A heavy rock of foreboding sits in her stomach that tells her that her family’s imminent starvation is on _her_ shoulders… but this merciless winter might be on Wirt’s. 

If that’s the truth—if these blizzards are Wirt’s call for help, or his rage, or his excruciating loneliness—then that means he should be able to improve things, too, if only Beatrice can snap him out of it. 

She recalls his stubborn defiance (“Maybe I’ll never give this up”) and sets her jaw. Months into listening to her younger siblings’ stomachs growling she marches back out into the woods with an axe and a scowl. In the lore whispered throughout the Unknown since before she was born, The Beast is drawn to despair like flies to a fetid corpse. He is a vulture that swoops upon the weakness of his prey and twines vines around the last feeble beats of their heart. 

Well—if anyone’s situation is hopeless, it’s Beatrice’s. 

She hikes to the clearing where it all ended and began. Cups her frozen fingers around her mouth and bellows for all she’s worth. 

“WIRT! I know you’re out there!”

(It isn’t as if she’s never called his name before—maybe she wasn’t frantic enough to lure him in? Or maybe his own heartbreak was so potent, so fresh in his ribs that he wouldn’t notice how much she wanted to find him anyway.)

After ten minutes of pacing back and forth and yelling Beatrice adds some insults to the mix, frustration getting the better of her. Then some pleading. Then just his name, until she’s hoarse, and the sun starts to edge down the ivory sky and settle into the highest branches. She nearly jumps out of her skin when someone’s hand alights on her shoulder.

“Wirt? Isn’t that the kid who clipped your wings?” It’s Andrew, her eldest brother. Behind him are her other older siblings, Bram and Audrey. “Didn’t he go home a long time ago?”

“He… uh…” Beatrice’s eyes wander everywhere but their questioning faces. “It’s complicated.”

(What would sound right? “I’m not actually sure he went home” or “his home is the Unknown now, he’s the new Beast.” On one hand she sounds like the worst, most uncaring friend ever; on the other she sounds _crazy._ How to explain that she’s known Wirt was out here all along but she never found him?)

Bram looks worried. “Is he in trouble? He could have come home with us, you know that. Mom would have taken him in so fast his head would spin. Is his brother out here too?”

“His brother is fine. I’m just worried about Wirt,” Beatrice declares. “He… said he would stay in touch, but I haven’t heard from him. So I… wanted to make sure he’s okay.”

Make sure he was still Wirt. Make sure he hadn’t entombed himself in thorns. Maybe find out if he held the seasons in his thrall, and could give the forest a respite from this glacial nightmare. The Beast was said to bend the woods to his whim, after all. 

“You wanted to make sure he’s okay… by shouting for him aimlessly in the woods.” Audrey gives her a long stare. “Do we need to organize a search party?”

Beatrice internally curses her nosey kin. “He’s shy. It will be better if—”

Of course they’re already tromping through the snow, fanning out, calling Wirt’s name. And Beatrice has to admit, they’ll cover more ground if they work together. They might not flush The Beast from wherever he’s hiding… but perhaps he’ll hear them better. He’ll know that somebody is looking for him. 

And she can finally tell him she’s sorry for leaving him like a wounded animal she wasn’t allowed to take home.


	2. 🙞Bluebird’s Prize🙜

They don’t find Wirt that night, even though Beatrice and her siblings call out for him hours after darkness falls and the temperature plunges so low their ears and noses turn red. The pearly light of the half-moon guides them home. Beatrice tries not to reveal her anxiety, the stomach-twisting guilt of having messed up badly _again._

Her family confronts her, demanding to know why she’s searching for Wirt. What happened to the boy. Why she hasn’t said anything until now. Beatrice denies (“I don’t know”) and deflects (“I can’t tell you”) until she spouts something that makes everyone shut up.

“How do you find The Beast?”

Their shock is etched in firelight. All of them are crowded in the main room at the front of the house, where Beatrice’s parents and the rest of her brothers and sisters cornered her. Bram, Andrew, and Audrey warm themselves silently by the hearth and wait for Beatrice to spill. 

“You think The Beast took your Wirt?” Her mother’s voice breaks the tense silence. Suddenly their collective quiet takes a somber tone, everyone believing that the real reason Beatrice hadn’t brought Wirt back with her—why she’d lied about him and Greg making it home—was because he’d been seized. Both her mother and father gather her into a fierce hug. “You should have told us, sweetheart… we would have mourned him with you.”

Beatrice burns with frustration. She can’t tell them what really happened. She can’t agree that Wirt is dead, either. Even if her family _did_ believe what had happened in the clearing, she’s _certain_ that she’d never be allowed out of this house by herself for the rest of her natural life. “I can’t explain,” the girl replies tightly, her voice muffled by her parents’ embrace. “The Beast didn’t take Wirt. He’s just… lost. He’s lost and I need to find him. All right?”

A clamoring argument chatters up at this—more questions Beatrice needs to evade and outright orders for her to come clean and she’s raising her voice to be heard over eleven peoples’ bickering when they all hear it.

_Singing._

The clear, wordless tenor resounds through the house’s hush. Those pure notes reach them from far away, ringing through the trees, and yet Beatrice’s scalp crawls as if the music has slithered up her spine. All of them recognize the melody—it’s something practically everyone in the Unknown has heard at least once if they’ve spent time in the woods. It is lovely and lonely. It tempts lost souls closer and makes those listening sick with dread.

The song of The Beast. 

Beatrice’s parents instinctively hold her closer; the rest of her siblings bunch in like a bluebird flock, forming a protective circle. Her youngest siblings, Florence and Edwin, sniffle with the threat of tears. Every single of one of them is acutely aware of their hunger, their dire winter situation, and all of them except Beatrice think a monster has come to prey on their despondence.

“Andrew, Bram, go find the shotgun.” Beatrice’s father speaks in a taut murmur, brittle compared to the liquid grace of the song outside. The boys take off upstairs. 

“Let me go with them,” Beatrice asks abruptly. Her heartbeat pounds, a thump in her stomach. “I can get the crossbow, too.”

A second of hesitation. Then her father nods his permission, and he and her mother regretfully loosen their hold on her.

Beatrice bolts out the door before anyone can grab her.

Their frantic screams of “BEATRICE! BEATRICE, COME BACK” fire at her shoulders. She can’t turn around but she hears them all crowded in the doorway, horrified, unable to chase after their reckless daughter for risk of losing the rest of their children. The cacophony of their sheer panic nauseates Beatrice more than the music she’s sprinting toward, whose haunting crescendo seems to resonate in her own lungs. 

The trees are stark pitch-black and backlit in silver filigree. Beatrice trips and skids into the snow once, jostles her way back up, keeps running, struggling to inhale enough to shout. “Wirt! Is that you?!”

The desolate melody pours into her soul. It’s swimming through her veins like her own blood. She hardly believes this is _Wirt_ singing, the painfully shy boy who didn’t even want to admit he played the clarinet, but Beatrice doesn’t know what else could possibly croon The Beast’s song so powerfully. Eventually, she realizes that the night-dark of the woods has brightened with an alabaster glow that has nothing to do with the moonlight. Her breath catches. Her heart is thrumming so fast it aches. 

She crashes through the breakable twigs of a small holly shrub back into the same damn clearing. The song cuts into silence. A standing shadow props itself against a maple’s trunk, antlers twisting wide as Beatrice’s arm span; its pale, pale gaze lifts slowly in her direction, throwing searing light across her ruddy face. 

Beatrice swallows and her throat is stuffed with wool—dry and thick. Perhaps she cannot see Wirt’s features because of the dark night, the contrast of his burning eyes, but another part of her brain—the one begging for her to _run fly run_—remembers that The Beast had been cloaked in shadow, and Wirt _is_ The Beast, and even if she were to light a torch she’d still see the same chilling silhouette peering back at her. Her jaw muscles spasm, uncertain if Beatrice is going to shriek.

“Wirt? It’s me… Beatrice.” Her voice keens high and thin. Some of her curls have come loose from where she tied them back this morning, but she doesn’t dare make any sudden movements. “Why are you out here singing? Were you… were you looking for me?”

If he says “yes,” she’s going to throw up. Why did she run out of the house—why?!

The creature blinks; it’s like someone throwing a shutter over a floodlight. Beatrice notices how much taller Wirt is than when she saw him last, at the beginning of this ruthless season. He has at least six inches on her. “Beatrice?” An impossibly smooth voice unfurls into the frosty atmosphere. It is beautiful to listen to: delicate and rich as silk. Except… Beatrice detects a frayed edge to it, _exhaustion,_ and her stiff posture loosens by a fraction. 

“H-heard you...calling me...” Wirt—The Beast—Wirt?—slumps farther down the bark he’s pressed against, and Beatrice glimpses spines sticking out of his shoulders like the quills of a porcupine. Another slow blink leaves a blurred afterimage smeared into Beatrice’s retinas. When he reopens those paranormal lanterns the hue of his irises has shifted back to the sapphire blue she recalls from his transformation. He coughs—a sound decidedly _not_ beautiful, but ragged and wet. “Sorry. I got lost. S-sorry, sorry…” Gilded thread unraveling. Tone scratching away to nothing, his spiny shoulders bouncing with increasingly harsh hacks. The blackness obscuring his features leeches away from him, seeping down his body toward the snow, revealing more secrets Beatrice hadn’t seen at first.

His hands—one braced on the maple, the other clenching his stomach—are _claws._ Wicked talons of murky wood that could wrap all the way around Beatrice’s neck. His antlers spear from his temples, tortuous as Edelwood branches. His face is still human enough (thank god) yet the circles under his ghastly eyes look like smudges of charcoal. Wirt tries to straighten himself, fails, and it turns out that his claws are clutching a splash of ink blotted over his abdomen. Beatrice thinks this is just a shadow, until she sees more ink tracing down the corner of Wirt’s mouth and flecked onto his shirt and hears the soft _plip, plip_ of viscous liquid hitting the snow. 

She swallows a gasp. Those aren’t quills jutting from Wirt’s back. Those are arrows. 

“Oh, Wirt,” Beatrice wails. “What happened to you?”

He lifts his crooked fingers from his stomach long enough to swat at the air, waving off her concern. “I’m f-fine… S’no big deal. C-can’t… k-k-kill…” 

Wirt wavers. Slides to his knees in a faint, eyes eclipsing. Beatrice trips forward to try and catch him and when he droops into her arms she shivers at the feel of him—too cold, too bony, too _light_ considering he’s so much taller and those antlers are solid _branches._ Panic speeds her thoughts into wildly flapping wings. What could possibly have hurt The Beast this badly? Should this even be possible? 

“We have to get you inside,” Beatrice says haltingly. “Hey—wake up. _Wake up,_ Wirt. We need to get you some help, okay? My family can take care of you but you need to get up and walk with me.”

He stirs slightly. A shallow groan meets her ears. “Your… f-family?”

Beatrice is lifting with her legs, gritting her teeth and grunting with the effort of hefting Wirt’s dead weight. Eventually he appears to reorient, scuffing his feet to better support himself.

In Beatrice’s peripheral vision, it looks like Wirt isn’t wearing shoes. His feet disappear into the crystalline white, and she really, really doesn’t want to think about what’s going on below his weirdly bent ankles if his timbered hands indicate anything.

“We’ll warm you up. Take care of these… _jeez,_ Wirt, who the hell shot you? You’ve got—_five_ arrows in your back?!”

“One… r-right here,” Wirt sighs, palm pushed back up against the large bloom of ink on his shirt. “P-pulled it out. Bad idea. A l-l-lot of blood… I think? Am I bl-bleeding...?” He sounds embarrassed. Beatrice experiences the overwhelming urge to throttle him. Thankfully, she converts that energy into shrugging one of Wirt’s long arms over her shoulders so they can trudge back to the mill side-by-side, her head ducking so that the tines of his branch-antlers don’t gouge out an eye. 

It’s slow going. Beatrice is electric with dread. Wirt pants like an injured animal and she’s not positive he won’t suddenly turn on her like one. The closer she and Wirt inch toward the mill, the more her chilled body shakes. And it’s not just her; Wirt trembles with every step. 

He actually balks like a deer when her house is visible from the treeline. Beatrice’s siblings and parents have shut the door—barricaded it, most likely—and her chest constricts at the muted sobbing she can hear. 

“Listen to them. So dramatic.” She steadfastly ignores the tremor in her words. “Lets hurry up and get inside so they can stop freaking out. And, you know, so we can get those arrows out of you.”

“N-no, that’s all right… I don’t want to go inside…” Wirt’s velvet voice curls up small, the limpid cerulean of his irises staring at her house with longing and… and _fear._ Now Beatrice isn’t so sure he’s trembling because he’s too cold. 

She scoffs. _She’s_ the one who should be terrified, out her by lonesome talking to a monster. The protectiveness she once felt toward him—when he’d just been a lost kid, trying to find home—spreads its wings. 

“What? Are you afraid my family will force dirt down your throat again?” Wirt opens his mouth, probably to say that her family will be afraid of _him,_ and Beatrice steamrolls ahead. “They know you’re my friend, idiot. They remember you. Actually, they wouldn’t stop pestering me after I broke the curse. ‘Where’s that nice boy? Does he want to visit us?’ Yikes.” She wrinkles her nose after imitating her mother in a completely inaccurate nasal tone. “They’d probably adopt you if you let them. You’d make a nice pet.”

That comment makes Wirt bristle like he used to when she needled him—“Are y-you comparing me...to a _dog?_”—and Beatrice sighs in relief that a fraction of this awkward, loveable nerd still exists. 

“Follow my lead. Don’t do anything creepy. No growing vines, no singing, no weird poetry, no eldritch howling. Got it?” She squeezes his waist—fires out a quick apology when he moans—and turns to her front door. To her immense surprise, they’ve left it unlocked; probably hoping she’d realize her grave mistake and turn back. Beatrice turns the knob and pokes her head past the threshold and offers a sheepish, drained grin to her shocked kin. 

“Hey everyone! I’m not dead! Also…” She pauses. There’s no gentle way to break this to her family. “I found Wirt. He’s not dead either. And, uh...”

Beatrice kicks open the door the rest of the way. The azure glow of Wirt’s eyes floods the front room. He waves with a beastly claw, muttering a stunted greeting that trips over itself and falls to the floor. And for once, her brothers and sisters and mother and father have nothing to say.


	3. 🙞Bluebird's Nest🙜

They aren’t mute for long. The screaming starts soon after Wirt slides from Beatrice’s gasp and collapses in a dead faint, antlers knocking against the door frame. A small puddle of obsidian blood forms a puddle under his chest. Nobody can decide if they want to stare at the black stain or the antlers or the arrows jutting from Wirt’s torn cloak. Shrieks of “THE BEAST” and “My god, the boy—” and “is that _Wirt?!_” and “GOD, HELP US” assault Beatrice’s ears. She battles their riot as best she can (hollering loud as a banshee) until ultimately her mother’s shrill command of “_QUIET!!!_” shuts everyone up.

“We thought you were running to your _death,_ girl,” the woman seethes. Tears spill over her cheeks and then Beatrice is crying too and so are most of her siblings, and yes, they are all hugging again, although Beatrice won’t let them pull her away from Wirt. She crouches in front of him with ferocity sparking from her features that not even her father contends with. 

“I’ll tell you the whole fantastical story… but we need to help Wirt. He’s hurt.” Beatrice wipes her nose on her sleeve and juts out her jaw. The gruesome boy behind her coughs and makes as if to get up and all of them, including Beatrice, jolt. 

Wirt is mumbling something, not meeting any of their stares. After her heart rate has stopped buzzing Beatrice hears him and brazenly whips out a hand to close around one of his antlers. Her family collectively inhales. Wirt blinks at the unexpected invasion of his space and bites his tongue. 

“Nope. You’re not going back out there. I already froze my ass—”

“Young lady,” pipes her mother, “_language—_”

“And I’ve found you after all this time. So you’re staying here and we’re yanking those _stupid arrows_ out of you. Uh-uh,” she barks when Wirt begins demuring again, shrinking into himself. “I’m taking care of you. And that’s final.”

Beatrice is sick of messing things up for other people, for abandoning them when they need her. And although those gathered behind her are still so strung with tension they might snap, they also see that this beastly creature has not lashed out at any of them, nor made a single threatening gesture whatsoever. He still wears Wirt’s earnest face despite not having Wirt’s warm brown eyes. 

Besides—Beatrice might literally fight them if anyone tries to kick this new-Wirt out.

🙞 ------------------------- 🙜

The only reason Wirt doesn’t end up in one of their bedrooms—or on the couch by the fireplace—is because he starts shaking uncontrollably when Beatrice insists he remain inside the house. The thought of being indoors evidently terrifies him. That, or the guilt of imposing has finally shattered whatever strength he was clinging to after bleeding all over the damn place. In the end, he and the brave, heedless girl who’s brought him home compromise: Wirt will stay in the dilapidated mill next to the house. Hunks of the roof and sections of wall are missing, so Wirt can gaze up at the sky and smell the clean bite of ice and hear the branches creaking outside without truly _being_ outside. He reassures Beatrice, over and over, that the cold doesn’t bother him. Really. 

Pretty hard to believe him given how much he quakes. How frigid his flesh—and the knotted wood of his hands—feels to her fingertips. But Wirt has survived out in the wilderness all this time so Beatrice thinks: what the hell. Her family appears more comfortable with this arrangement, anyway. If they cannot fully accept that this is still _Wirt_ then they can grudgingly allow Beatrice to nurse her “friend” back to health as if he’s a sick fawn she found under a pine.

One of her siblings always follows when Beatrice creeps into the mill for the first few days. Wirt rests in a pile of hay swept into the corner. Mostly, he sleeps, still as a corpse except for the fragile rise and fall of his chest; occasionally Beatrice catches him staring out at the puzzle-pieces of forest just beyond the mill, eyes at half-mast. She notices that he tries painfully hard not to frighten her kin; kind of difficult to forget the way her sisters took off screeching when Beatrice starting pulling arrows from his back and unholy onyx liquid dripped from each sharp arrowhead. 

Beatrice hadn’t needed to stitch the wounds shut. Like the one ripped over his stomach, that oily blood slowly congeals into a sap that only leaks if Wirt strains himself. 

He won’t let her take his battered cloak to mend it, nor his ruined shirt to clean it. He hugs himself tightly when she insists, promising that one of her brothers will lend him some clothes and mocking him for his modesty. 

“Nobody wants to watch you change, weirdo. You’ll have all the privacy that a busted mill with three solid walls can give you.”

“It’s… n-not that,” Wirt hedges. He’s buried his feet in his hay-bed, and does so any time he hears someone enter the mill. Below the hems of his pants his ankles are knotted like roots. His wrists are the same way. Beatrice can’t see under his sleeves, but she bets that the ebony texture continues at least up his forearms. A saddening thought strikes her: perhaps it’s not that Wirt is afraid of others seeing him bared. Maybe he doesn’t want to see _himself._

So she drops the matter, and acts as if she doesn’t hear the sorrowful snippets of half-delirious poetry Wirt whispers to himself when he thinks he’s alone. Lines about stags catching their antlers in a trap. Roots embracing blood vessels. Verses about abhorrent transformation, drowning in the soil, the sweetness of oil, and…

Beatrice strives to not eavesdrop.

🙞 ------------------------- 🙜

Whatever happened to Wirt, it struck him _hard._ Several times Beatrice cannot wake him from his deathly slumber and only his muted wind-through leaves snoring reminds her that Wirt lives. On evenings when exhaustion hangs heavy around her neck, Beatrice could swear that she hears the forest sighing in rhythm with his breath. It’s unnerving, to put it lightly.

Not quite as unnerving as the animal visitors, however. She can explain away the whispering woods as a figment of her imagination, but the critters that sneak into the mill to nose around her friend are as real as her own hand in front of her face.

On a clear morning she makes a disgusted nose when she sees frozen mouse-corpses strewn around Wirt in a ring. She accidentally wakes three barn owls that have taken up residence; they swivel their ghostly masks in her direction and judge her with their dark eyes. 

On a snowy day, when flakes bluster in through the mill’s many cracks, Beatrice stops by to lend Wirt a blanket and startles a few blue jays that were bickering on Wirt’s branches—er, antlers. He rouses just enough to half-heartedly flick his claws at them as they take off before rolling back over and falling asleep again. 

On an afternoon when her family feels their hunger pangs sharp and rancorous, Wirt greets her with the still-warm bodies of two hares. Their necks have been bitten open, heads lolling at a wrong angle. Beatrice shudders—sure she’s going to see a smear of scarlet across Wirt’s mouth—but he holds the gift out to her, gesturing at the set of fox prints that lead to and from his nest of hay. “I don’t need these,” he rumbles, abashed. “They just… the animals like to… I don’t technically need to _eat,_ so…” 

Beatrice accepts the homage with as much grace as she can. Her family eats rabbit stew for dinner and they all agree that it’s the most delicious thing any of them have ever tasted.

🙞 ------------------------- 🙜

“Hey… Beatrice?”

The feeble question catches Beatrice off guard. She’s stubbornly dropping off some second-hand items for Wirt to shrug into when he’s not feeling shy or ashamed and she hadn’t expected him to be alert. 

“Yeah, Wirt?

“D’you… th-think The Beast could be… good?” He swallows audibly. “Like… I don’t ha-_have_ to be the bad guy. I could find a way to not turn people into trees, maybe. Another way to keep the lantern lit.” He curls a little tighter into the hay. “A guardian. Instead of an… undertaker.”

The redheaded girl doesn’t answer because it seems as if Wirt is mainly trying to convince himself. After a heartbeat of hesitation she kneels and takes his hand in hers, trying to warm the ice out of it.

“If anyone can figure it out, it would be an overthinker like you.” 

The antlered boy is almost asleep when he murmurs something else, something Beatrice barely catches as she folds the well-worn clothes by his side and backs away.

“_Please don’t hate me._”

“Wirt?” she whispers. But he’s asleep, chest rattling and smoldering eyes drifting shut to leave Beatrice in the dark.

**Author's Note:**

> Bonus Tracks: "You're The One That I Want" by Lo-Fang, and "Atlantic" by Keane.
> 
> This was supposed to be three short chapters and then I threw up all over my keyboard. Apologies for the rambling length - just had a lot of thoughts about this one, and a few different endings before I settled on this one.
> 
> Who shot Wirt? What the heck is going on with his feeties? Is he going to stay with the Beatrice horde? 
> 
> Thank you to everybody that trips into this mess and lends their time to read it. Everyone's well-wishes and gracious comments make me smile. I've seen a few authors visiting that I recognize from other fics I've read, and I swoon with happiness each time. You guys are the bomb <3


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